Greed Can’t Lead

Many parts of the economy of the USA are falling apart, or getting retarded. It is as if the economy was not an activity worth having anymore.

Even Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, an admirer and perpetuator of plutocracy, recognized that 75 percent of the public schools have structural deficiencies and 25 percent have problems with their ventilation systems. Dozens of thousands of bridges are falling apart, and the number of those decaying is growing faster than the number of those getting repaired. Even Russia is building high speed electric rail, and China claims to build 47 such lines, but the USA is not working on a single one. What is going on?

A small power elite has grabbed the debate, and imposed its conceptology, and its axis is maximizing financial profit, independently of any other considerations. Unfortunately for humankind, that financial world is derivative, not primary. It is a convention, not a realization. Thus make belief has replaced what really is. The real infrastructure is disintegrating, precisely because the derivative rules, and, as all mathematicians know, integration is the inverse operation from differentiation.

This is not a silly play on words and concepts: the mathematical analogy here goes all the way; letting financial derivatives rule is basically a gigantic mathematical mistake civilization has been making, in great part because those who decided, or let decide in their name, a bunch of lawyers without calculus background, such as Bill Clinton, were cognitively incapable of understanding the most basic mathematics in play.

To have made financial profit the guiding principle of civilization is, of course, deeply absurd: the fox was made guardian of the hens.

Finance was given extravagant powers in the last two centuries, powers that it did not have in the 4,000 years of civilization before that, and for very good reasons.

This abdication of power made finance the real power behind the throne, worldwide.

As Baron Nathan Rothschild (yes, from the Rothschild family) put it: "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, …The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."

Puppet. That is Rothschild’s word, not mine. It is also reality. A reality that explains the main diversion of most available capital towards the system set-up by Goldman Sachs and the like in the last 90 years, and, in particular, reinforced in the last 13 months.

Indeed, unbelievably for those not in the know, this is the exact same system that brought fascism to Italy, Germany, Spain after World War One, and made Britain, France, and the USA into close calls themselves.

The same system of thought, and actually some of the other same institutions were tender nannies for nascent Nazism (Nazism being just the most outrageous example, outrageous not just because it happened that way, and the horrendous toll, but because the instigating institutional system was capable to successfully cover its tracks. Of the people behind the Nazi scene, only Hjalmar Schacht, a "Lord Of Finance" was put on trial, and promptly acquitted in 1946. But Schacht, directly, and his ilk, more generally, made it so that Hitler got his job).

There are extremely extensive regulations in most economic domains, worldwide, but not so much in finance, although finance is the overall money creating and money allocating system.

Finance created Hitler, even the Soviets. Lenin used to joke that the "capitalists would even sell him the rope to hang them with"; at least one American plutocrat, Averell Harriman, was bestowed with the honor of being made a "Hero of the Soviet Union". Harriman got the top medal both from the Soviets, and the Nazis!

The bank Brown Brothers Harriman was a massive money laundering operation for the Nazis. JP Morgan organized and financed German cartels that propelled Hitler, etc. Unsurprisingly the same lords of finance are back to variations of their old tricks, as they allowed, if not incited, some governments to turn around all sorts of laws. Then, having violated the law, they trade on this, as the ultimate insiders! [Some of this occurred even in the last few weeks, so sure of impunity Goldman Sachs is. I say: write international warrants of arrest!]

So what is happening now, with the invention of financial derivatives, is that most of the world’s disposable capital is manipulated by financial sharks, so as to create fake revenues, to justify their bonuses and overall power wielding. There is therefore no more capital for the real economy (or, more exactly, increasingly insufficiently little).

Hence all financial products ought to be declared unlawful, until proven safe and effective. Financiers already are endowed with the regalian power of creating money (which government bestowed on them in the last 2 centuries, but which they did not have prior).

However, financiers know not enough to create a sustainable economy. Financiers are not engineers, just profiteers. And their search for profits has blinded them to their extravagant privilege, and even to how the universe works. Civilization is an exquisite mechanism, and so is an increasingly stressed biosphere. [This is not to be taken lightly: violating ecology and civilization simultaneously is how the immensely old Maya civilization self destructed, without any exterior input aside from a drought.]

None of this is new in principle. As James Madison, fourth president of the USA put it: "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance."

This is not new, but we have just reached the breaking point, the point at which civilization and the biosphere are not sustainable anymore, from the activities of that obsolete particular financial system. It brought us Auschwitz, among other disasters. Left in power, it will bring up worse, soon.

There are other emotions than greed. Love, altruism, the passion for understanding, or for a job well done, can guide reason better than the obsession with having what one stole from others as they were looking somewhere else. It is time for reason to guide, and greed to be crushed. Otherwise there will be no world to call home, for anybody, whatsoever.

Annex and background: 1) FINANCIERS HAVE BEEN TELLING US WHAT MAN IS, AND THEY ARE WRONG. They have just been telling us about who they truly are. It’s all about them, not us.

Subjacent to economic theory is neuroeconomics. The hypothesis that the financiers and their political servants made, that profits ought to dominate social organization, was, fundamentally, a neurological hypothesis.

But greed belongs to the basic instinct of the Will To Power, whereas studying neurology belongs to the specifically human endeavor of establishing systems of thought. In other words, the neurologist is a new species, with a new kind of motivation, whereas the financier is an all together different species, animated by the sort of motivation we have seen in the last half a billion years, since there are social animals, and they crowd together, and need a unique leader, to have the single mind that allows them to stick together. This need, E Pluribus Unum, is the fundamental reason for the Will To Power, Nietzsche talked so much about. Will To Power is also the mechanism behind tyranny, oligarchy, and the domination of the Lords Of Finance.

Man is the species that went beyond Will To Power as the fundamental organizational principle of society. Being overlorded by finance is subhuman.

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2) The "Nobel" Prize in Economics was given for some equation helping to price some financial call options. It surely will not be given for the simple mathematics alluded to above, which are much more drastic, but much more deserving, as they throw the entire existing financial system out of the window, as deserved for flaming material threatening to burn down the house of civilization.

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3) Shacht (economics PhD, 1899) met with the American JP Morgan as early as 1905. Yes, JP Morgan, founder of the eponymous bank, whose present leader is much admired and befriended by Barack Obama (so he says).

Shacht, in charge of finances in imperial Germany occupied Belgium, was summarily dismissed, when his superior, general von Lumm, discovered that Schacht had diverted funds through his present and future employer, the bank (Dresdner), the sort of incest that passes for routine in present Washington.

After WWI Schacht came to lead the Reichsbank, the German central bank, and got to campaign against Germany paying war reparations, and helped set-up the Young and Dawes plans with Wall Street (which made Germany into Wall Street toy and profit generating center).

By 1926, besides supporting Wall Street, JP Morgan and various American banks’ operations, Shacht, the most important Lord of Finance in Germany, entangled with American financiers, through and through, was supporting the Nazis. Soon Schacht organized petitions by top personalities and plutocrats to persuade president Hindenburg to nominate Hitler Chancellor. Schacht’s financial career blossomed further under Hitler, as he headed the Reichsbank and the economy ministry (busy stealing Jews and other victims). He was to rise again after he got cleared of any wrongdoing in 1946.

Not to say that Shacht was thoroughly evil in appearance. He was not. Like Eichmann, his evil was rather “banal” (to use the concept from Hannah Arendt). Like Eichmann, Schacht pretended to keep on befriending Jews under the Nazis, and have empathy for them.

For a plutocratic servant, Schacht was rather personally pristine. But he efficiently pushed many extremely criminal ideas in his lifetime, and thus he was an ideal instrument for the plutocrats. Such people are legions. Instead of attacking them one by one, day by day, emotion by emotion, and anti-idea by anti-idea, it is more productive to attack the system of thought that gave rise to them.

And, as it is, the criminal system of thought is the regalian fractional reserve banking system, which allows private, unrepresentative, unelected, unsupervised money men, the bankers, to create most of the money, and distribute it to whoever they want, to do whatever they please.

Indeed, contrarily to what most people believe, although the state makes physical bank notes and coins, it’s the big private bankers who create most of the money, and, aggravating factor, do it through debt. That system was created, because it is very profitable to those, the plutocrats, who selected the politician-servants who defend and further their interests. That it went on for about two centuries in some parts (Britain) does not mean it is sustainable. Rome switched to a system biased towards plutocracy in 300 BCE, but lost its republic about 255 years later.

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The question of how to have a currency, and how to make money to use in the USA, was a central question from 1791 (when up to an amazing 50 currencies were used inside the USA) until the “greenbacks” of the Secession War. Two attempts were made at making a “Bank of the USA”. The second such bank helped create a huge bubble in land and agriculture, to feed Europe, and displace its agriculture, after the old continent had been devastated by the Napoleonic wars (this to say that speculative bubbles can serve imperialism well). Because the “Bank of the USA” got accused of corruption and undue influence of European financiers, it was allowed to expire under president Jackson.